March 29, 2009

Science Publishers Stepping Up Online Community Initiatives

In a challenging market environment, some of the leading
publishers of professional and scholarly information are stepping up their use
of social media to gain competitive advantage and address the needs of audiences in the R&D community.

From at least 2005, when Nature Publishing Group launched its
Connotea social bookmarking service, through Elsevier’s recent integration of
its 2Collab collaboration tools with its flagship ScienceDirect and Scopus databases,
publishers have been bringing researchers more broadly and openly into the
science publishing conversation.

Two recent announcements show that social networking in
this marketplace now is evolving toward more formal and ambitious efforts. Elsevier, with the help of private online
communities-builder Communispace, last week officially launched Innovation
Explorers, an online community of 300 researchers from 69 countries.The stated goal is to gain better insight
into issues, challenges and unmet needs within the research community; Elsevier
is also inviting its direct customers in libraries to join the community and
interact with the expert “Explorers.”

The use of online communities of researchers to generate and
test new ideas is in itself not new.For
example, BioInformatics LLC has operated its Science Advisory Board for over 10
years, a community now numbering over 40,000 life science researchers and
physicians who participate in syndicated and customized market
research studies provided by BioInformatics.The Innovation Explorers
initiative signals that publishers are recognizing both (a) the potential
competitive advantages to be gained by nurturing their own branded communities,
and (b) the value of the kind of specialized expertise and experience that a
dedicated community builder like Communispace (which has built other branded
communities for companies such Kraft, HP, Charles Schwab, and Hilton Hotels) can provide.

A potentially more far-reaching intersection of science
publishing and online communities was the announcement this month of a
new partnership between Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and InnoCentive,
Inc.The latter company, founded in
2001, has built a successful open marketplace for innovation that enables
companies, government agencies and other organizations (e.g., Procter &
Gamble, Eli Lilly, SAP and the Rockefeller Foundation) to post “challenges.” These “Seekers” offer over 170,000
engineers, scientists, inventors, business people and research organizations (“Solvers”)
financial rewards ranging up to $1 million for their solution. Examples of past challenges have ranged from
a food company offering $40,000 for a “Reduced Fat Chocolate-Flavored Compound
Coating” to a research foundation offering $1 million for a “Biomarker for
measuring disease progression in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.”

As "How We Decide" author Jonah Lehrer has noted, a study of
InnoCentive led by researchers at Harvard Business School found that nearly 33 percent of problems posted on the site were solved within
the specified time frame. In making their announcement, both NPG and InnoCentive emphasized the growing importance
of open innovation for achieving cost savings and accelerating development in a
period with R&D budgets are under pressure.

The agreement by NPG and InnoCentive to launch a new, joint
platform exemplifies the power that publishers still wield in concentrating high
quality audiences whose value can be further enhanced within online community
frameworks. And it will be interesting to see if, how, and when the latest developments in social bookmarking, such as Twine, and the approaches to monetization being more fully developed in consumer and "horizontal" b2b markets, will also be fine-tuned by publishers in more focused domains.

We checked out Kuma’s spa for Mandarin Oriental a few months ago. At Storefront. It was cool. Lots of water. Nice design. And then, today, we heard Shigeru Ban speak about his villas—one called S, the other H—at the Japan Society. With Joseph Grima. Who runs Storefront. Which makes us wonder. What’adsfs in it for Dellis Cay? And what’s really in it for Storefront?